When President Obama held a prime time news conference last week, he hoped to push along the revision of the nation's health care system. He wanted it passed in the House before it left for the August recess and to the brink of passage in the Senate.

Instead, the next 48 hours saw House leaders draw back from a planned floor vote while key committee negotiators in the Senate remained in disarray. Among the many reasons for this reversal, three stand out.

The first is the fundamentally disconnected process by which Congress makes laws, a process designed by founding fathers averse to centralized power. As longtime Republican Congressman Barber Conable put it years ago, the government works just as intended, which is to say not very well.

Refining the workings of one-sixth of the national economy was never going to be easy. Trying to do it fast -- or what counts as fast in legislative terms -- lent the effort focus and force, but it also heightened the risk of sudden derailment.

The second reason the president was frustrated in this particular moment was of his own making. Allowing his legendary discipline to lapse, he let his own emotions show in reference to the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge, Mass. When he said the police acted "stupidly" in the matter, he doomed his own hope that the next several news cycles would be about health care.

Indeed, once the news media had galloped off after the Gates story, momentum on health care shifted perceptibly on the Hill. The slim chance of passage in both chambers before August was gone.

Why do we in the media prefer a story about one racially charged incident in Massachusetts to the president's most important domestic initiative? For the same reason that one Cambridge arrest was the talk of your workplace this week and health care was not.

Of course we all know that our health and our medical care and the cost and governance of both are more important than what two guys said to each other on a front porch last Sunday afternoon. But our grievances over race and class and identity and authority are far more immediate and deeply emotional. So whether we as news people are reflecting our audiences or ourselves, the result is much the same.

Beyond its visceral impact, the Gates story had the great appeal of human scale. You needed only a few seconds of information, or misinformation, to become engaged in it or upset about it. This sort of story makes great TV and inflames the blogosphere in a way no discussion of controlling structural health care costs in the out years ever will.

And that is the third reason the president was not able to seize the day this time. Everyone has a notion of what health is and what the medical system does, but delving into the particulars of either gets complicated. It requires attention and perseverance.

In his news conference of July 22, the president tried to keep the emphasis on the failures of the current system. He talked about those without care or without insurance. He talked about the runaway costs and the inevitable worsening of the crisis. Here his eloquence and intensity served him well. You could imagine people listening.

But when he responded to questions by dipping into the facts of the proposals he supports, he lost that personal connection. You could imagine people losing the thread, zoning out and reaching for the remote.

That is why advocates of change rend their garments when they hear opponents saying the president has not provided "enough detail." It is at least as possible that the degree of detail the president has tried to provide is in fact hobbling his effort to push the issue forward.

When Ronald Reagan signed a fundamental rewrite of the federal income tax in 1986, he blessed it for lowering the top marginal tax rate for individuals and eliminating "loopholes." He did not traffic in the trade-offs and countless adjustments that made the new mechanism work. He even denied it raised taxes on business, which it manifestly did.

We also have the memory of Bill Clinton's health care plan in 1994, a monument to detail that was understood by few (and loved by fewer). Obama's political situation does not allow him to float above the fray to a Reaganesque degree, but he does want to come down somewhere closer to that model than to the Clinton alternative.

What people usually mean when they ask for more detail is this: How will the changes affect me? Under all the different scenarios that might arise in my lifetime, what will happen? People don't want to be told simply to trust the government, and they obviously cannot be blamed for that.

Detailed information, in the end, is probably not the problem. If it were, the entire debate would be different. In this age of information-rich Web sites and search engines that find them in nanoseconds, those who really want more detail have more access to it than ever before. If the presentational style of the Congressional Budget Office is too forbidding, there are reader-friendly versions, partisan and nonpartisan, all across the cyberhorizon.

In the end, the fine detail of any new program is never entirely clear until the program is place. That is true whether you are talking about changing employment rules or banning a substance or invading a foreign country. The political system produces a new direction; policymakers put it into law. Then a world of players, both in and out of government, co-create the new reality.

That is what will happen with the government and health care, if the president can get his top priority back on track in September.

It's not every day that a Senate vote affecting a few aircraft and a couple of billion dollars gets on Page 1 or makes the TV news. But then it's not every day that the Senate makes a tough call against its own self-interest.

Whatever else the Senate does right or wrong this year, it did a sensible thing this week in cutting off the F-22, a Cold War fighter jet that now costs $350 million per copy to build and $44,000 per hour to fly.

This was a weapons system the Pentagon said it no longer needed. The Joint Chiefs and secretary of defense had long ago fingered the F-22 as an airborne anachronism, still aloft long after its mission had ended. The new, smaller F-35 is the future, and it supports ground operations more closely.

They had a powerful ally in Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and an even showier one in John McCain (R-AZ). Known as a combat pilot with deep roots in the military, McCain called this F-22 decision a major test for his colleagues.

Could they break their habits of fealty to campaign contributors, lobbyists and labor unions? Could they cut off a program when its sponsors had spread the fruits of its subcontracts across more than 40 states?

For many a Capitol Hill veteran, the answer was an all-too-predictable no.

But, lo, when the roll call came in, the answer was yes. By a resounding 58-40, the Senate chilled the jets. In the moments that followed, on the Hill and on the tube, nearly everyone talking about the vote did so with widened eyes. The very numbers seemed electric.

All the old cudgels had been taken up. Defenders hailed the F-22 as essential to air superiority and a major source of jobs -- two killer arguments in the world of weapons procurement. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican whose state benefits from much of the F-22 spending, openly challenged the idea that the Defense Department and the White House should determine which weapons systems we needed. That was a job for Congress, the senator said, his voice rising.

And yet, the outcome was not as predicted. A different kind of calculus prevailed. The call for change seemed to resonate again, as it did in the campaign of 2008.

One reason may have been Democrats' concern that their president was losing altitude at a critical phase of the legislative calendar. He had said he would veto the entire $680 billion bill for defense if it included the F-22. It was less than half of 1 percent of the total, but it was a perfect foil for a first veto threat.

In the end, President Obama was backed by three-fourths of the Democrats, and McCain brought over 15 Republicans. Many of these votes in both parties came from senators whose states will lose at least a small piece of the F-22 pie.

If you watch Congress operate very often, you will appreciate the specialness of this moment. Consider the far more common case of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. For four days, that panel replayed the same short list of issues and questions. It was soon apparent that the goal was not to produce a coherent picture of the nominee. It was, rather, to produce a series of separate movies, each starring a different senator performing the same basic script for consumption back home.

Or consider the all-too-familiar landscape of the current battle over health care. The president's problem on that broad front is not the Republican remnant that declares total opposition to anything he proposes and calls it his Waterloo. His real problem is with the individual legislators in both parties who parse every provision of every bill for its potential effect on their own re-election -- and most especially, on their sources of campaign cash. This is the dominant culture in our Congress.

That's why the F-22 skirmish was immediately inspected for implications in the health care struggle. Was this a sign the president might still overcome the profound self-interest that motivates Congress on this, his top priority? Maybe not. But it was a much better sign than a vote for more F-22s would have been.

It might even give the White House reason to hope.

Pity the poor Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They had to sit through four days of Sonia Sotomayor hearings under those hot TV lights, watching the Republicans have all the fun.

Oh sure, when it comes to the votes, the Democrats will prevail. They have a dozen committee seats to the Republicans' seven. And some of the GOP senators are likely to join them in voting to confirm President Obama's first choice for the Supreme Court, on committee and on the Senate floor next month. (More on which ones in a moment.)

But during the nominee's Big Media week, all the Democrats could do was smile at her, ask her friendly questions and slather her with praise. That's pretty much the only role allowed to the party of the president these days when a lifetime seat on the court is at stake.

It was far more compelling to watch the Republicans on the panel as they wheedled away, trying to get the nominee's goat, looking for what one called "a meltdown" moment.

At the same time, these same senators had to watch themselves, lest they give offense to women and Hispanic voters, who have already been trending Democratic in recent elections.

All in all it made for fine political theater, especially when spoken in the rich accents of Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Each spoke in the soft and expressive inflections of the South, even as they provided the toughest questioning of New Yorker Judge Sotomayor, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.

Still think the War Between the States is a relic from the century before last?

Time was when you could hear people talking in the Senate cloakroom and often identify their their party. Southerners were Democrats, period, from the Civil War until recent decades.

In our time, the regional split between the parties has reversed itself. The South tends to favor one party predominantly, and since 1994, it has favored Republicans with a majority of its Senate seats, House seats and governorships. More recently, as GOP fortunes have declined elsewhere, the onetime party of Abraham Lincoln has become increasingly identified as the Party of the South.

Of the 26 Senate seats defined as Southern by Congressional Quarterly, 19 now belong to Republicans. Throw in Kit Bond from Missouri (a border state) and you have half the 40 Republicans in the Senate hailing from one region.

Homing in on the Judiciary Committee, only one of the seven states represented on the panel by Republicans is a state that fought for Mr. Lincoln in the Civil War. That one would be Iowa, which was also the only state of these seven to vote for Barack Obama for president.

The other six states on the GOP side of the committee were either secessionist (South Carolina, Alabama and Texas), formed after the war by Southern sympathizers (Oklahoma) or admitted to the union decades later (Utah, Arizona).

We can see the obverse on the other side of the judiciary panel, where eight states have one Democrat on the committee and two states (Wisconsin and Minnesota) each have two. All 10 of these states stood with the Union in the Civil War (although we could quibble about Maryland, a border state that also had many Southern sympathizers). One thing is clear: All 10 voted for Barack Obama.

These 10 states with Democrats on the committee also tend to be more urban, including as they do four of the six most populous states (California, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania). The seven Republican states include Texas, the second most populous, but no other state ranked higher than 13th in population.

Despite the clear divisions of region, population and politics -- and despite the partisan tone of the hearings -- the committee is not expected to vote strictly on party lines when it considers the Sotomayor nomination later this month. While every Democrat is expected to vote for her, at least one or two Republicans may do so as well.

Orrin Hatch of Utah seemed disposed to vote for her, despite misgivings about her political associations and statements she had made. Charles Grassley of Iowa left himself enough room to vote for her, which the political realities of his state would also favor (Grassley will be on the ballot in 2010).

South Carolina's Graham also may vote for her, although he could be said to have done her the most damage in his questioning. Graham takes more chances than most senators in his public style and in his votes as well, and his hints throughout the hearing suggested he could go either way.

On the Senate floor in August, Sotomayor can count on several more Republican votes. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Richard Lugar of Indiana have announced they will vote for her, as had Mel Martinez of Florida (who is retiring next year). George Voinovich of Ohio, also retiring next year, is considered another potential yes vote.

Observers generally expect two other female senators to support Sotomayor. They are Susan Collins, Snowe's colleague from Maine, and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, who like Snowe and Collins favors abortion rights.

The fourth Republican woman in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, has a mixed record on abortion. But right now she is running for governor, challenging incumbent Rick Perry in next year's GOP primary. A vote for Sotomayor would not help her against Perry, although it could boost her prospects in the general election in a state that is 30 percent Hispanic.

Perhaps the biggest question mark at this point is Arizona's John McCain, the party nominee in 2008 and a frequent friend to Hispanic aspirations. McCain might like to vote for Sotomayor but may feel the approach of his own primary in 2010 and the tug from his in-state colleague Jon Kyl, a likely vote against confirmation.

Assuming all Democrats and independents are on hand, Sotomayor has a good shot at 70 votes, including up to 10 crossovers.

This would be a stronger showing than the last justice to be seated, Samuel Alito, whose appointment by President George W. Bush was confirmed 58-42 in 2006 with the help of just four Democrats. But it would fall well short of the standard set by Bush's first pick, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was confirmed in 2005 with 22 Democratic votes added to all 56 Republicans.

In the early 1990s, the great majority of Republicans crossed over to vote for President Bill Clinton's two nominees, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who were confirmed 87-9 and 96-3, respectively.

That now seems a simpler time, and far away.

Presidents have a lot of fine privileges, from flying on Air Force One to meeting the most important people in the world. But how many of these perquisites really compare with what Barack Obama got to do last night?

As the sun went down in St. Louis, the president tossed the ceremonial first pitch at the All-Star Game. He flew to the game with Willie Mays and at the dugout shook heads with Stan Musial. And if that were not enough boyhood-fantasy fulfillment, he went to the booth for a little baseball banter with longtime broadcasters Tim McCarver and Joe Buck.

Is it good to be the king yet? Well, yes, and it is good to find respite in our official national pastime (read: baseball) after a few months of our unofficial national obsession (read: politics).

Baseball takes this break just past the midpoint of its season, providing a chance for fans to assess the standings and project the post-season. So as the president takes the mound, we must extend the metaphor to ask: What kind of season is he having?

The call: He's like a rookie pitcher who's had a flashy start but who's still getting sized up by the rival hitters. As for the aggregate White House team, they have the equivalent of a lead in their division but remain far from assured of a pennant this year, much less a World Series ring.

Of course, there's room for an argument with the umpire here.

In their own minds, the president and his inner circle may see him as Albert Pujols, the hometown St. Louis slugger who saved the president's pitch from hitting the dirt last night (and who leads the majors in homers, runs scored and runs batted in). In team terms, they may idealize the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are close to winning two games out of three so far this season.

But in the eyes of rivals and critics, the president and his team are limping into the break. They returned from their latest trip abroad with little to show that interested most Americans, who are still anxious about the pace of economic recovery. As Obama's approval polls got softer lately, more Democrats on Capitol Hill seemed to be wandering away from key elements of his agenda.

Why, then, do we still see him in first place at this point?

First, he's still the pace setter in every sense of the term. His rise remains the pivotal development of recent political history, and his trajectory has yet to turn downward. He is deciding which issues the nation's capital will focus on and which it will defer. He is providing the batting order and dictating the tempo of the game.

So when people talk about reviving the economy, redefining health care, rebalancing the energy-environment equation and re-regulating the financial industry, they do so because the Obama administration set these priorities. Down the road, we expect to see education, immigration and gay rights added to that list, each along the lines the Obama people prefer.

So wide is the horizon of rethinking that even the historic nature of Obama's first Supreme Court nomination, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has seemed just another link in the chain.

Second, the president has powered this agenda with the first vision of systematic change the country has seen on the progressive side in more than 40 years. When he talks about what he wants to do, he goes well beyond the minimalism of re-election strategy. In fact, he sees far enough ahead to guarantee that he will be called a radical and that his re-election will be a struggle.

That may be prove to be overreaching, and it may be foolhardy. But the sheer risk factor lends momentum and magnitude and excitement of a kind most presidencies never approach.

Third, the new president has stepped out on the world stage in a way no one has dared since Richard Nixon went to China. In just his first few months in office, he has refashioned the nation's military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and revised its posture toward Iran, North Korea, Russia and the Middle East stalemate. For better or worse, he is determined to open a new era of American internationalism.

Fourth, this president is benefiting from the down year of his party's national rival. Many GOP heroes of past seasons have retired, and veterans such as Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky seem past their prime and uninspiring. It was always going to be a rebuilding season, but lately, even the can't-miss young GOP talents have been washing out or coming down with career-ending injuries.

To be sure, the true measure of the Obama presidency and its Republican foes will be taken over more than one season. But much will depend on the outcome of this first year, and much will be determined when the big legislative packages all reach the floor in the fall. As it looks now, the fateful moments may well coincide with those of the World Series in October.

No one can say now whether Pujols will be leading his St. Louis teammates to the championship in that month. And no one knows how his old battery-mate from the All-Star game will be faring in his own Big Leagues, either.

When the National Governors Association convenes next week in Biloxi, Miss., it is likely to have several members missing the call of the roll.

We could start with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. His political condition was upgraded to stable this week when a majority of the GOP's statewide executive committee voted in favor of a painful resolution of censure rather than call for his resignation.

It's no picnic to be censured by your own party for an extramarital affair you had while hiding from family and staff in South America. But the failure of the committee to urge Sanford's ouster means he'll have a chance to finish his term and restore some of his personal dignity. And given the month Sanford had been having, that counted as good news.

It also counted as relief in the gloom of what has been a year from hell for governors coast to coast.

While Sanford was refusing to offer his resignation, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was baffling the political world with hers. With no warning, the former GOP vice presidential nominee yanked the plug on her tenure as governor. She vowed to stay in the fight for the America she believed in but suggested she needed a different, perhaps larger battlefield. Her announcement divided supporters in the Lower 48 much as her time in office has divided her previous admirers in her home state.

But before the week was over, attention had shifted from these two falling stars to other gubernatorial travails. In Illinois, a former chief of staff to former Gov. Rod Blagojevich pleaded guilty to corruption charges. He is now expected to be part of the case against Blagojevich in court, where the charges that led to the Democrat's impeachment and removal from office may send him to prison.

It was a reminder that this gubernatorial annus horribilis began early with the highly unusual spectacle of a major state impeaching a twice-elected governor (and one whose party controlled both chambers of the Legislature).

Another Democratic governor unhappily in the news was David Paterson in New York. Paterson this week attempted to break a 31-31 tie in the state Senate by appointing a lieutenant governor who could break that tie in the Democrats' favor (much as Vice President Dick Cheney did for the GOP in the U.S. Senate in 2001). But no sooner had Paterson announced his choice than the move was declared illegal by yet another Democrat, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

Lest we forget, Paterson was thrust into office last year by the downfall of fellow Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who was caught patronizing a prostitute. Nowadays, according to The New York Times, Paterson's poll numbers are worse than Spitzer's.

Out in California, meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger might be grateful to have problems like Paterson's. Another partisan deadlock forced the Republican regime in Sacramento to enter July without a budget, so the Governator is now issuing IOUs to vendors and employees alike, and banks are saying they will not honor the scrip.

And then there are the governors who remain scandal-free and a step ahead of the fiscal sheriff but are nonetheless suffering from acute re-election problems.

Perhaps the biggest target in this category is New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who left the Senate nearly four years ago to try his hand at the chief executive role. Although New Jersey has looked prohibitively blue for years, Corzine is now trailing his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, by double digits. With the off-year Election Day coming in November, it's hard to see how former Wall Street whiz Corzine pulls this one out, even with all his millions (he spent more than $100 million of his own winning his Senate and gubernatorial terms).

But there are others looking over their shoulders as well. In Texas, Rick Perry has been governor since George W. Bush left the office for the White House. But Perry's re-election is clouded by an intraparty challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison, the veteran Republican senator often called the most popular politician in the state.

And in Ohio, where Democrat Ted Strickland was thought to be cruising to re-election, the weakness of the economy is giving new hope to the GOP.

The economy is, of course, the main source of grief for governors of all stripes and in all regions. From Florida to Oregon, state governments are being forced to slash programs, lay off workers and, where possible, raise taxes as well.

Coping with that economy will be the main order of business at the NGA meeting, where frustration is likely to reign. There is not much a governor can do about unemployment approaching double digits (where it's not there already). Yet governors take the heat for all the unpopular measures they must take in a down economy.

Many political scientists and other observers continue to view the states as the laboratories of good governance, a source of hope for civic success. But a combination of hard times and bad behavior has battered this belief. And it has done even more to damage the image of the governor as the glamorous executive, the can-do source of solutions.

As a result, the sense that any gathering of the NGA is a casting call for president has faded.

If the house isn't full in Biloxi, it won't be the sticky Gulf Coast summer to blame.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has won millions of admirers with her gift for direct, personal communication. Her appeal combines an earnest and urgent seriousness with a bright and winning air of spontaneity. And the governor was working each of these elements extra hard at her hastily arranged news conference Friday.

She needed to, because she had a difficult message to deliver and an even more difficult rationale to sell.

Few were surprised to hear that the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president (and likely contender for president in 2012) had decided not to seek re-election as governor in 2010. But the blockbuster came a few seconds later, with the second part of her announcement.

With what appeared to be a smile of delight, she began explaining why she would not "go with the flow" and complete her term in office. It would be the easy way out to serve as a "lame duck," she said, and she was not that sort of person. She wasn't a quitter. And so, she said, she had decided to ... quit.

This leaves two paths ahead for Palin, who will leave office in three weeks.

Choice One: She can go home to Wasilla and try to remake the life she had there before politics (or at least statewide and national politics) blew it up. This might have the much-to-be-desired effect of removing her from the late-night comedians' hit list, the incessant tabloid chatter and the endless round of recriminations with John McCain's 2008 campaign team. Just this week, Palin had won the dubious distinction of being named "Sitting Duck" of the year by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Choice Two: She can stop worrying about the intricacies of the Alaska budget and the internal squabblings of the Legislature in Juneau and concentrate on putting together a campaign for 2012. After all, she is one of the three Republicans mentioned most often as her party's preferred candidates for Next Time (along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, who both ran in 2008). Among Republican primary voters, she had the highest personal approval rating of any 2012 Republican prospect in a recent Pew Research Center poll, and it was over 70 percent.

So Sarah Palin is a player for 2012. And when that is true, a politician nearly always views all other elements of Creation through that presidential lens. When viewed through that lens, being governor of Alaska has done Palin as much good as it's likely to do. The governorship has already proven far more difficult in her third year than it was in her first two, when she gathered in the low-hanging fruit. This year, her star power turned against her and engendered resentment.

In recent months she has battled legislators, including those in her own party, preferring to vilify them rather than negotiate with them on the budget and other challenges. Her once stratospheric approval rating in statewide polls has slipped, and re-election in 2010, while still likely, would not have been a waltz. Needless to say, even a hard-won re-election victory in 2010 would have weakened her momentum in terms of the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2012.

So it was widely expected she would find a time to bow out as a candidate in 2010. There's no sin in leaving a governorship after one term; in fact, the Commonwealth of Virginia only allows one term.

But Palin has raised a world of new questions by deciding to limit herself to far less than one term. She will have 17 months to go on her contract when she resigns. Some may be satisfied with the explanation she offered on Friday, that finishing her term would be "politics as usual" and a self-indulgence. She said it was time to "pass the ball so the team can win." Maybe that's all there is to it.

Others will suspect the governor is so focused now on 2012 that she believes she must devote herself to it whole-heartedly, even at the cost of her mission in Alaska and her implicit pledge to serve Alaskans.

What is so pressing? She needs time to build a staff that is loyal to her alone, as we can see from the endless replays of the internal wars of the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008 in Vanity Fair and Politico this past week. She must show she can raise tens of millions of dollars before the primaries, and hundreds of millions after that. And most desperately, she has to develop a more resilient media sensibility that can turn both fawning and savaging attention to her purpose.

Assuming the soon-to-be-former governor wants all this, and has prepared herself for the sacrifices ahead, she is making a hard-headed decision to reach for the brass ring and to do it now.

We've been hearing it for as long as we can remember. To make Big Things happen in Washington, the conventional wisdom says you need the Big Three: the presidency, control of the House of Representatives and 60 votes in the Senate.

It is not unusual for one party or the other to have a grip on the first two of these levers, but it has been nearly 30 years since either party had the third. Those three decades have given rise to the Myth of 60.

Senate rules require a three-fifths majority to cut off debate and vote on an issue of significance. That means a filibuster by a handful -- or even a single senator -- can freeze the institution in place. Without the 60 votes it needs for cloture, the majority can set the agenda, but it cannot necessarily bring any element of it to fruition.

And that, in turn, allows whichever party is nominally in charge to blame its frustrations largely on its lack of 60 votes in the Senate.

That myth is about to busted.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that Al Franken won the disputed Senate election in that state last November. It has taken eight months, several recounts and two court cases to reach this point, but Franken will be sworn in next week.

Combining Franken's win with the seven other seats Democrats wrested from the GOP in November 2008, and tossing in party-switcher Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Majority Leader Harry Reid now finds himself with 58 card-carrying members of his caucus. And when you tack on the two independents, Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, as the Democrats usually do when there's a party-line roll call vote, you have 60 on one side.

That means Nirvana for Reid, right? No. It might just make his life miserable.

Just because 60 people put their feet under Harry's table at the weekly Democratic policy luncheon does not guarantee him that many votes on the floor. Even if Sanders and Lieberman prove relatively reliable, you cannot say the same for all the official Democrats.

In two cases, there are issues of health. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is suffering from cancer and has not been seen on the Senate floor in weeks. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia has been in and out of the hospital and at 91 is a question mark on any given day.

Let's assume for the moment that on a major issue, both Byrd and Kennedy (the two longest-serving Democrats in Senate history) will find a way to weigh in. The real problem may come from those Democrats who are physically hale but whose political position is delicate.

Reid's most immediate problem may be the last vestiges of the Southern Democrats, a rump caucus that once dominated the chamber. Jimmy Carter had to worry about 18 Southern Democrats in the Senate in 1979, a power bloc that still considered itself the fulcrum for the institution. President Obama, by contrast, needs to tend to just seven, all of whom are very much products of the New South.

That means Reid and his Senate majority will find their consensus point somewhere well to the left of where it was in Carter's day.

But that fact alone raises the prospect of breakaway Democrats spoiling the perfection of 60. Even if all seven Southern Democrats do go along, Reid must keep an eye on Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Begich of Alaska -- just to name a few.

But if having 60 votes on paper is not a guarantee of success, it is only a guarantee that expectations will escalate. And in that sense it is more a burden than a boon.

That is the real downside to the new Democratic domination. What will the party do when shorn of the time-tested excuse of the filibuster?

Think about the House side of the equation. The chairmen of House committees have long been told they had to bend to the Senate version of legislation because of the filibuster and the challenges of life in the Senate. They are weary of watering down their bills so as to serve the peculiar prerogatives of "the other body."

Given the new math, everyone from David Obey at Appropriations to Charlie Rangel at Ways and Means and John Conyers at Judiciary is going to wonder why he still has to knuckle under.

Isn't it time, they will ask, for Reid to get his Democrats in line and vote these big Barack Obama initiatives and systemic overhauls into law?

And if Reid responds by doing precisely that, won't he make the Senate circus all the more partisan?

It may appear that attaining 60 votes is achieving the Holy Grail. But in fact, it is a distraction and even a temptation.

The true path to greater achievement in the Senate does not depend on a three-fifths majority oppressing a two-fifths minority. It relies on skillful leaders to craft compromises that allow supermajorities to form on big issues, supermajorities that include members from both parties.

That is how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, and in those days it took a far more daunting two-thirds majority (67) to shut off debate. Bipartisan deals also passed the tax cuts of the early 1980s and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

There were similar moments in nearly every presidency since. And there may be more in the months to come.

The key is to bust the Myth of 60 as a magic wand for passing one-party bills. It may be useful as a threat or a fallback strategy, but reliance on a party-line vote to 60 will not bring Senate passage of health care, energy or financial regulation bills that truly matter.

For that, the president and his party will have to make law the old-fashioned Senate way, by bringing votes across the aisle one at a time.